Getting Married eBook

misunderstood, as Jesus, they think, could not have
said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless
they are prepared to add that the statement that those
who take the sacrament with their lips but not with
their hearts eat and drink their own damnation is
also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most
solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation,
not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it
compulsory in certain cases as the Chinese do.

When the great protest of the XVI century came, and
the Church was reformed in several countries, the
Reformation was so largely a rebellion against sacerdotalism
that marriage was very nearly excommunicated again:
our modern civil marriage, round which so many fierce
controversies and political conflicts have raged,
would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and
hailed with relief by Luther. But the instinctive
doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in
sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate
from any priestly ceremony, but which in those days
seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation,
could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale
of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation
left marriage where it was: a curious mixture
of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhorrence,
and later Christian sex sanctification.

OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife
is an article of property, greatly depreciated in
value at second-hand, and not to be used or touched
by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt from
Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate
lovers are Antony and Othello; yet both of them betray
the commercial and proprietary instinct the moment
they lose their tempers. “I found you,”
says Antony, reproaching Cleopatra, “as a morsel
cold upon dead Caesar’s trencher.”
Othello’s worst agony is the thought of “keeping
a corner in the thing he loves for others’ uses.”
But this is not what a man feels about the thing he
loves, but about the thing he owns. I never understood
the full significance of Othello’s outburst
until I one day heard a lady, in the course of a private
discussion as to the feasibility of “group marriage,”
say with cold disgust that she would as soon think
of lending her toothbrush to another woman as her
husband. The sense of outraged manhood with which
I felt myself and all other husbands thus reduced
to the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a very unpleasant
taste of what Desdemona might have felt had she overheard
Othello’s outburst. I was so dumfounded
that I had not the presence of mind to ask the lady
whether she insisted on having a doctor, a nurse,
a dentist, and even a priest and solicitor all to
herself as well. But I had too often heard men
speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences
to feel surprised that exactly the same view is held,
only more fastidiously, by women.